SWCAMBORNE

Along with the historic wedding photos Kathy and Brian had another good idea at their wedding.  Instead of a guest book they had the guests send them postcards.  They supplied a big stack of historic Arizona postcards and some pens and the guests were asked to choose a card, write Brian and Kathy a message on it and leave it in a basket.

This is an excellent use of postcards which need new uses since no one is sending them any more.

Go Postal is a free app for sending picture postcards via the U.S. Postal Service to friends and family from your iphone. At present it can only be used to send postcards to U.S. addresses. You can use your own pictures and it only cost $1.29.  This is very similar to Postcards from Anywhere an idea I had a few years ago that would have been much more retro.

a postcard from the Philippines

I’ll give this idea a try and see if it works and of course report to you.  Via postcard or blog.

thanks to Matt Geldin for spotting this new Iphone app for me.

This is a Public Service announcement:

Postage rates in the USA go up on May 11, 2009

Click here to go to the USPS site for details

First class postage is going up two cents to 44 cents and a domestic postcard is going up a penny.  The killer for me is that overseas postcards are now 98 cents each.

But all of the rate increases in the world won’t save the postal service.

Read my old post on why the Post Office is doomed.

It is not because they are doing a bad job.  It is because technology has changed.  The USPS will be the Amtrac of our childrens generation.

A young admirer with a postcard

Postcards are the lp record of the future

they will vanish in his lifetime

The record player is dead and it’s replacement the CD is dying because the IPod is a better delivery system.  We adjusted to the low-cost high value technology.  And we will adjust to the end of regular mail delivery.  The countries that do it the fastest will gain a slight competitive advantage.

We were in Charlseton, South Carolina for a wedding just after Christmas.  There is an album of pictures from the trip on Flickr. Charleston is a beautiful city. I’ll write more about this visit.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was the Angel Oak.

As you can see it is a very large Live Oak tree.  That is variously claimed to be between 1300 and 1500 years old and the oldest tree East of the Mississippi the Rockies or the Appalachians.  Superlatives and digital cameras are everywhere.

What is not to like: This is a large, beautiful tree with free admission.  But what I found most wonderful about it was the way it lived in a perfectly symbiotic relationship with a gift shop.  In which you could buy postcards and every other kind of gewgaw with a picture of the tree.

the superlative postcard

Think about this.  A large tree without a gift shop attracts no one.  A gift shop without a focus attracts no-one.  But the symbiosis (great word) of the two creates a destination.

So the business idea to derive from this is that a destination can be created by adding a gift shop to a place of interest.  My ideas include:

• Watts Towers in Los Angeles
• the huge Magnolia Tree in Santa Barbara
• the largest Joshua tree in 29 Palms
• the Zzyxx offramp on the way to Las Vegas
• the Georgia Guide Stones near Elberton, Georgia

A gift shop would help make each of these a destination and the gift shop would make money for someone.

Life is good!

Each year we get a few less Christmas/Holiday cards but in the remaining ones we get an increasing number of photo cards.  We also get more and more online cards and online holiday letters.  It has been an interesting evolution to watch.  If I was paying careful attention I’m sure that there are also ways to send greetings on Facebook and MySpace.  I just don’t know what they are.

Our 2008 Hanukkah card.

I have always justified sending cards by using the tradition and the effort arguments.  It is the way we have always done it, and if sending greeting at the holidays requires only a few clicks and no expenditure how sincere are they?

This year we received one holiday greeting that I think is a vision of the future of the genre in a post post office world. Peter Klein, who has always worked at the bleeding edge of technology, sent an excellent photo story of his families year and by doing so he shows a new way of sending holiday greetings.  It requires some effort but no printing or postage.  And the technology should be assessable to most people.

http://www.peterklein.com/Christmas%202008/1.htm

I’m not sure how this can be commercialized and by whom.  I would guess the Shutterfly and Kodak type companies have a shot at it.  Maybe the idea would be to sell some stock photos of winter scenes, yule logs, ice skaters, feasts etc. as part of a free package that people could then add their own family photos to.

Probably our last holiday card.

It is always exciting to get a glimpse of the future.  Thank you Peter.